A Two-Phase Coordinated Planning Approach for Heterogeneous Earth-Observation Resources to Monitor Area Targets

Monitoring various types of disasters involves diversified requirements, such as the spectral band, resolution, and timeliness. However, at present, different types of observation platforms are separately operated. This isolated resource organization model is insufficient to meet the requirements of various Earth-observation tasks, especially when disasters occur. As a result, it is necessary to construct an Earth-observation network that contains space-air-ground observation resources and makes unified task planning for the included heterogeneous resources, such that the efficiency of the entire observation system is maximized. In this article, an architecture with two planning phases is proposed for the coordinated planning of heterogeneous Earth-observation resources, in which area targets and four types of space-air-ground observation resources [i.e., satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), airships, and ground monitoring vehicles] are considered. The two-phase approach in this architecture includes an area target decomposition phase and a task allocation phase. In the first phase, an area target hierarchical decomposition (ATHD) method is proposed to decompose the area targets into subtasks. In the second phase, a task conflict heuristic allocation (TCHA) method is proposed to allocate the decomposed subtasks to subplanning centers. Extensive experiments on simulated and realistic scenarios are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ATHD and TCHA methods. The computational results show that the ATHD method substantially improves the efficiency of the coordinated task planning process. Moreover, compared with traditional task allocation methods, the TCHA method could produce high-quality observation plans for the Earth-observation network, as it brings complementary benefits via the comprehensive usage of heterogeneous space-air-ground resources.